Politics and Literature Latin America - Essay

Latin America

SOURCE: "Borges—Literature and Politics North and South," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 222, No. 7, February 21, 1976, pp. 213-17.

[In the following essay, Bell discusses Jorge Luis Borges 's literary output during a fifteen-year period of personal and political crisis, and assesses his subsequent influence on North American literary and cultural theory.]

I

Surveying the sum total of Borges's works, one is struck by a kind of "bulge" at approximately the middle of his career. This bulge constitutes the relatively brief spell—1939 to the middle 1950s—during which the Argentine writer produced the...